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IoT in practice

The feeder wagon can send information to the InTouch team based in Dunboyne about whether the operator put the feed ingredients in correctly, and whether the ration was then delivered correctly to the animals.

“Feed efficiency is the goal”, says Mr Walker.

“And digital tech can greatly improve this. We have examples of farmers loosing up to £1,000 a year if a machine is not loaded properly and we can monitor this, and also how the ration was mixed through technology.

“Over-processing of the ration means more fuel is being used, the machine will wear quicker, and feed efficiency can be reduced by up to 10 to 15 per cent.”

Neovia already has a head start in understanding the complex relations between the IoT and its overwhelming masses of data, and the decision-making tools.

With investments in mobile applications for livestock farmers (for example My Farm Aqua, which studies and monitors performance factors in aquaculture farms, and Standipig, which measures performance in pig farms) and in a company called Equisense, which develops connected objects dedicated to horses, Neovia has gained extra expertise.

More recently, Neovia co-launched the Applifarm start-up with an aim to become the leading platform in the ruminant sector in France and connect 10,000 farmers by the end of 2018.

This is a platform which will use various sources of data (management, feed, dairy operations, livestock advice, breeding, performance monitoring) in order to help companies in the ruminant sector to create new services for livestock breeders and farmers.

Developers

These services will range from benchmarking performance and daily management to more customized recommendations.

More generally, Applifarm aims to help to improve economic performance and the profitability of livestock operations.

Applifarm is also a low-cost means of creating and developing new services which would be expensive, or even impossible to develop individually.

Using data already provided by the founding companies, the platform will be open to application developers.